This Day in SJB History
Wow, what with the post-Oscars frenzy I'm not getting anything done on my dissertation this morning, so how about a trip down memory lane instead? This'll be fun, I promise.
Ten years ago today, on a cold night in a dark New York City alley, Margaret and I met David Letterman. I'm pretty sure I talked about nothing else for the rest of 1996, because I was a little -- yes, I'll say it -- obsessed with Dave at that point in my life. Anyway, although some claimed I was stalking Letterman, I was simply in the right place at the right time. 
And I had a camera with me. Dave and I chatted, we took these now-infamous photos (visitors to my bathroom may have seen them prominently displayed), and I returned to my dorm room at dear ol' Wes with a plan: I would assemble the greatest Web page ever.
I spent a good deal of March 1996 teaching myself HTML and learning the ins and outs of Web page design, and the result was the now-defunct "I Met Dave" Web page, which some of you may have actually seen back in its glory days. And what days they were! The "I Met Dave" page shot up the charts, and became a fixture on "Top Ten Web Pages about David Letterman" lists across the Internet. I enjoyed this pseudo-fame for a few years, until Wesleyan unceremoniously took down the pages, and my tale became nothing but a broken link.
But the story didn't end there. After the I Met Dave page I actually parlayed my HTML skills into a couple of jobs -- a summer gig with a scissors company, and then an actual full time job as Assistant Web Editor with a nonprofit in New York -- and a budding career as a freelance non-paid journalist with Flak Magazine. One night at a bar in NYC, I was telling someone about my plans to leave behind the web editing gig to start a graduate program in Spanish Literature. I remember the look of horror on his face as he told me I could jump onto the dotcom gravy train and make $80,000 a year starting tomorrow. "Spanish Literature isn't about the money," I told him, "it's about the babes." Was I the only one who felt a sense of satisfaction when the dotcom bubble burst a few years later?
Now, seven years after that auspicious conversation, I've finally picked my HTML skills up off the floor and put them to use in this blog. All thanks to Dave and that dark alley 10 years ago.
Ten years ago today, on a cold night in a dark New York City alley, Margaret and I met David Letterman. I'm pretty sure I talked about nothing else for the rest of 1996, because I was a little -- yes, I'll say it -- obsessed with Dave at that point in my life. Anyway, although some claimed I was stalking Letterman, I was simply in the right place at the right time. 
And I had a camera with me. Dave and I chatted, we took these now-infamous photos (visitors to my bathroom may have seen them prominently displayed), and I returned to my dorm room at dear ol' Wes with a plan: I would assemble the greatest Web page ever.I spent a good deal of March 1996 teaching myself HTML and learning the ins and outs of Web page design, and the result was the now-defunct "I Met Dave" Web page, which some of you may have actually seen back in its glory days. And what days they were! The "I Met Dave" page shot up the charts, and became a fixture on "Top Ten Web Pages about David Letterman" lists across the Internet. I enjoyed this pseudo-fame for a few years, until Wesleyan unceremoniously took down the pages, and my tale became nothing but a broken link.
But the story didn't end there. After the I Met Dave page I actually parlayed my HTML skills into a couple of jobs -- a summer gig with a scissors company, and then an actual full time job as Assistant Web Editor with a nonprofit in New York -- and a budding career as a freelance non-paid journalist with Flak Magazine. One night at a bar in NYC, I was telling someone about my plans to leave behind the web editing gig to start a graduate program in Spanish Literature. I remember the look of horror on his face as he told me I could jump onto the dotcom gravy train and make $80,000 a year starting tomorrow. "Spanish Literature isn't about the money," I told him, "it's about the babes." Was I the only one who felt a sense of satisfaction when the dotcom bubble burst a few years later?
Now, seven years after that auspicious conversation, I've finally picked my HTML skills up off the floor and put them to use in this blog. All thanks to Dave and that dark alley 10 years ago.
Labels: SJB on SJB
posted by SJB at 2:34 PM
3 Comments:
You can see the original I Met Dave page here. Man. That was 10 years ago?
Oh. My. God. Let's hope it was 10 years ago, and let's hope I've changed just a little bit since then. By the way, here's Nick's old homepage. Touché.
I'd simply like to say to those of you who decide to explore the vast archive opened up by Nick, that the SJB of 2006 is no longer responsible for the SJB of 1996. Address all inquiries to the flux capacitator.
Man, you gotta love the early days of the internet revolution.
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